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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Now Tepco reports that six more employees 'may have' exceeded the 250 mSv limit

TEPCO should dig deeper. I'll bet that some respectable due diligence out of the power company would reveal dozens of cases like this, including non-employees who were living in the exclusion zone. From NHK:

Growing exposure problems at Fukushima

The health and labor ministry says six other workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have received radiation doses above the allowable emergency level.

Tokyo Electric Power Company reported to the health ministry on Monday on the results of the latest checks of workers at the power plant.

The ministry says the provisional amount of radiation exposure was up to 497 millisieverts for each of six TEPCO male employees. The maximum allowable dose was formerly 100 millisieverts, but it was raised to 250 after the crisis started.

One of the men was working in the control center, while the other five were performing maintenance work.

Six additional workers received doses of between 200 and 250 millisieverts, and 88 were exposed to between 100 and 200 millisieverts.

The ministry has instructed the utility to have the workers undergo thorough examinations, saying it is regrettable that so many workers have received such high doses.

In late May, two TEPCO employees on duty at Reactors No. 3 and 4 were confirmed as having received doses more than twice the emergency limit.

Monday, June 13, 2011 20:57 +0900 (JST)

And to think there was a time in april where Tepco was trumpeting that 'no employee has yet exceeded the maximum allowable limit'. We now realize they came to conclusions without considering all possible sources of radioactive exposure, and they should know better.